There have been two books that have been repeatedly brought to my attention recently. The first is Victor Frankel’s Man’s Search For Meaning. More on that later.

The second is Steven Pressfield’s War of Art. Now I’ve read this book before (no surprise with my obsession over learning about the creative process), but to be honest, I don’t remember much about it. Another reason why I need to rely on my second brain.

Anyways, the one anecdote from War of Art that I’m running into constantly is the story of the pottery class. The story goes, a pottery class was divided in half. One half was told that their final grade was going to depend solely on the number of pieces that they made over the course of the semester. It didn’t matter if they were any good or not, they simply had to make as many as possible.

The other half was given the opposite challenge. They were to be graded solely on quality. They only had to make one piece, but it had to be sheer perfection.

The surprise at the end of the semester was that the students who focused on quantity – who made as many pieces as they could – also had the highest quality pieces. Much better than the students who had put all their focus on creating one, quality, piece.

This goes against my nature. I have always been fastidious about quality. If my name is attached, I want it to be the best it can be. I have a real hard time with putting anything out into the world that could be considered subpar.

And yet, I wonder. How has this stopped me? Blocked me? What have I not created – or not shared – because this pressure of quality turned out to be more than I could handle?

So I’m trying an experiment. I am committing to blogging everyday for the next 30 days. They may be long, they may be short, they may be profound, or they may be simplistic. I’m not sure what is going to happen. But I am counting on the promise that, the more I write, the better it will get. The more ideas I will have. And the easier it will become.

We’ll see how it goes.